What America did

by Florence Finch Kelly

Automatic pistols proved of so much value at the front that General Pershing, as soon as the American troops had got well into the fighting, asked for the supply to be quadrupled and at once numerous private plants began to manufacture them. One firm that had been steadily turning out automatics at the rate of 1,500 per day prepared to double its capacity when the front line needs were made known. Of these and revolvers there had been sent to the front 600,000 up to the end of September, 1918. Of small arms ammunition, including that for machine guns, rifles, pistols and revolvers, American factories produced a total of about three billion rounds. Monthly production had reached a rate of 289,000,000 rounds. The armor piercing, tracer and incendiary bullets used in the Aircraft Service and in anti-aircraft defense were developments of the war and had to be designed for our own guns and to have special facilities for their production.

For the loading of shells four huge government plants were constructed with a combined loading capacity of more than 5,000,000 shells per month. They were larger than any similar plants in the world. One of them covered nearly 3,000 acres and was built and put into operation, from the breaking of the ground, in a little more than six months. For the housing of its employees a town was brought into existence, within that time, with heating, lighting and power plants, police and fire departments, cottages for families, dormitories with hot and cold shower baths for single men, club-houses, a theater, restaurants, a baseball field and tennis courts. Of high explosive shells of all sizes there had been made, at the end of September, 1918, 2,500,000; of low explosive shells, 3,100,000; of shrapnel, 5,800,000; and of grenades of all types 11,870,000. One grenade factory had established a pace of a million per month.

The tank, which was the answer to the machine gun, was one of the important new weapons evolved by the war, its basic idea having been suggested by the American farm caterpillar tractor, from which a British engineer worked out the formidable engine of battle which it became. Early in our participation the American Government began arrangements for a considerable tank production and experiments and investigations were started to better the design of those in use in the Allied armies. A Tank Corps was formed to have charge of the recruiting and training of the personnel, which numbered thousands of well trained men, but design and production remained in the hands of the Ordnance Department. The United States adopted two types, one the smaller form used by the French Army, of which 4,000 were being made, and the other a modification and improvement of the large tank used by the British, with whom a joint program of tank construction was being carried out when the armistice was signed. Liberty motors furnished motive power, which gave a speed of eleven miles per hour, and each carried a crew of eleven men, two six-inch guns and several machine guns. Some were equipped with wireless.

This huge tank, finished examples of which had been tested and approved, was forty feet long and could climb steep hills, cross trenches and smash down large trees. It would have been taken across the ocean by hundreds during the winter and great companies of them would have plunged into the enemy’s lines with the resumption of fighting in the spring of 1919. The component parts of a goodly number had already been made in the United States and sent to England for assembly.

A considerable part of the needs of our co-belligerents for propellants and explosives was being met in the United States when we entered the war and it was necessary that we provide our own supplies without interfering with this production for them. In all, four nitrate plants were constructed or started, and work upon them was rushed as fast as the supply of labor and materials made possible, while extensions and additions were made to existing facilities. Many scientists and technologists constantly carried on experimental and research work upon processes for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen and other problems connected with the supply of nitrates, and always with the aim in view of developing methods that would have economic as well as military value. The results were such as to make the nation for the first time in its history independent of any foreign country for the charge in the guns of its soldiers and also to bring much nearer the day when the United States would be independent of the nitrate deposits in foreign lands for its commercial and agricultural needs. The toluol for the manufacture of nearly all of the TNT used in loading high explosive shells was recovered as a by-product in the manufacture of illuminating gas. At the works of twenty-eight gas companies in different parts of the country plants were constructed, placed in the charge of experts and skilled workers and kept under the closest and most vigilant guard for the recovery of this important product, of which hundreds of thousands of gallons were necessary. As a result of the measures taken and rushed through, the supply of propellant and explosive material needed by our war associates was not interfered with and the loading of American ammunition was not delayed.

The hideousness of war was immeasurably increased during the world conflict by the new uses that were made of chemical science. When these new applications of the death-dealing possibilities of chemistry were first made by the German army the civilized world drew back, horrified and appalled. But when a barbarous foe makes savage use of science those who are fighting him must, in sheer self-defense, meet him with similar weapons. Therefore, when America became a belligerent, averse as all her people were to the use of such weapons, regard for the safety of her troops at the front made it necessary to prepare for this peculiarly hideous and detestable form of war. As with other munitions, the industry to produce the implements of chemical warfare had first to be created. The Government built great plants and the immediate need stimulated scientific investigation, with results that were like a tale of magic, so rapidly did these and contributory chemical industries grow.

The American Government did not overcome its reluctance to use toxic gases until we had gone forward several months in war preparations, when it was found, just as the English and the French had found, that it would have to be done. It was November, 1917, when ground was broken on a Maryland riverside farm for a huge plant that would produce overwhelming quantities of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas. When the armistice was signed a year later the three hundred acres were covered with vats and kilns, refrigerators, boilers, steel towers, chimneys, pipe lines, railways, and all the other means for carrying on the most deadly manufacturing processes known to man. For much of the machinery needed there were no existing models and many important parts of the immense plant were designed while it was being built. Experts from the French and British gas factories who came to assist in this development saw it rapidly evolve beyond their own knowledge and stayed to learn rather than to teach. Subsidiary plants were built also, and, altogether, American poison gas factories had a total production, during the last weeks of the war, of an average of two hundred tons per day. The British production, speeded to its highest possible point, was never more than thirty tons per day, the French was much less and the German is supposed to have been between thirty and fifty tons per day. Airplanes had been made and successfully tested for the dropping upon German fortified places, such as Metz and Coblenz, of containers holding a ton each of mustard gas with time fuses fitted for explosion a few hundred feet above the forts. Heavier than air, the gas from each container, settling to earth, would not have left a living thing, human or animal, upon, above or under the ground, within or outside of buildings, on a space the size of a large city block.

A new poison gas was developed, far more deadly than any previously in use, and its manufacture carried on with the greatest secrecy. At the end of the war ten tons a day were being produced and it was estimated that a single ton dropped in bombs and containers upon a city of a million inhabitants would have killed them all. Three thousand tons of it were to be ready in the battle zone by March 1, 1919.

Knowledge of these preparations and surety of what would, therefore, happen in the early spring of 1919 are believed by military authorities to have been an important factor in the sudden collapse of the German military plans.

Gas was employed in offensive operations in many and varied ways and these and defensive measures were so important that the necessity for a new division of military activities resulted in the organization of the Chemical Warfare Service in the summer of 1918. Five months old at the end of hostilities, the Service then contained 1,600 commissioned officers and 18,000 men. Defensive measures also had been rushed steadily forward, investigation and experiment had produced a better and more comfortable gas mask than was in use and a big Government gas defense plant had been built, equipped and started upon production with skilled workers. The monthly production of gas masks in the autumn of 1918, of which this plant made the major part, had reached 925,000. The total production for the year and a half was over 5,000,000, with 3,000,000 extra canisters, 500,000 horse masks and large quantities of ointments, antidotes and suits for protection against enemy mustard gas. The American gas mask was recognized by all the war associates as the best on the Western front.